18.5.12

A new publication from Contra Mundum Press

Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

The following is an announcement from Contra Mundum Press:

Self-Shadowing Prey

Announcing the first ever English translation of Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final books of poems by the renowned Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), and the first of Luca’s verse ever to be translated into English.

Self-Shadowing Prey is clearly constructed around the sought complications of language. Embodying the surrealist operation of play with considerable exactitude and rigor, Self-Shadowing Prey is rich with neologistic stupors, nouns made verbs, and compelling repetitions and linguistic expansions. Language is not merely put into play but made to participate in an erotic act, and words become the locus of an exploding self.

This linguistically-joyous text reveals the arresting syntactic creation and creative stammering which Deleuze and Guattari both saw in Luca and what led Deleuze to call him a great poet among the greatest. “If Ghérasim Luca’s speech is eminently poetic,” Deleuze pronounced, “it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T’AIME PASSIONNÉMENT.”

Transformed into English by distinguished translator Mary Ann Caws, this publication of Luca’s Self-Shadowing Prey gives us yet one more important text by a little-known but key figure of the Romanian branch of Surrealism

Video

Ghérasim Luca reads 'The Resting Whirlwind'.

Critical Responses

Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own.